WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not adequately justified
why the Bush administration failed to seek court approval for domestic
surveillance, said the senator in charge of a hearing Monday on the
program.

Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday he believes that President Bush violated a
1978 law specifically calling for a secret court to consider and approve such
monitoring. The Pennsylvania Republican branded Gonzales' explanations to date
as "strained and unrealistic."

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vermont Sen. Patrick
Leahy , predicted that the committee would have to subpoena the administration
to obtain internal documents that lay out the legal basis for the program.
Justice Department officials have declined, citing in part the confidential
nature of legal communications.

Specter said he would have his committee consider such a step if the
attorney general does not go beyond his prior statements and prepared testimony
that the spying is legal, necessary and narrowly defined to fight
terrorists.

"This issue of the foreign intelligence surveillance court is really big,
big, big because the president, the administration, could take this entire
program and lay it on the line to that court," Specter told NBC's "Meet the
Press."

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established legal
procedures for conducting intelligence-related searches and surveillance inside
the United States.

Specter said the FISA court "has really an outstanding record of not
leaking, and of being experts. And they would be pre-eminently well-qualified
to evaluate this program and either say it's OK or it's not OK."

Leahy charged that Bush misled the public when he said during the
presidential campaign in April 2004 that his administration was following the
law by getting warrants for wiretapping.

"I think ultimately we're going to have to subpoena them," Leahy said on
CBS' "Face the Nation," expressing doubt that lawmakers would get the material
otherwise.

Under the National Security Agency program put in place after the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, the government has eavesdropped, without seeking warrants, on
international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States who
are deemed to be a terrorism risk.

In testimony prepared for Monday's hearing, Gonzales argues that Bush had
authority under a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing force in the fight
against terrorism and that heeding the 1978 law would be too cumbersome.

"The terrorist surveillance program operated by the NSA requires the maximum
in speed and agility, since even a very short delay may make the difference
between success and failure in preventing the next attack," Gonzales said in
statements obtained by The Associated Press.

Specter was not so sure.

"I believe that contention is very strained and unrealistic," Specter said.
If the FISA law was inadequate, he said, Bush should have asked Congress to
change it rather than ignore it. "The authorization for the use of force
doesn't say anything about electronic surveillance."

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., was expected to press Gonzales on why, during
Gonzales' confirmation hearings last year to be attorney general, he dismissed
as "hypothetical" a situation in which the government conducted warrantless
eavesdropping. The NSA program was long in place by then, and Gonzales was
White House counsel.

Assistant Attorney General William Moschella, in a letter Friday to
Feingold, said Gonzales was referring to as "hypothetical" the idea that Bush
would allow warrantless monitoring that was illegal.

That statement is accurate, Moschella wrote in a letter obtained by the AP,
because the administration's position is that Bush had legal authority under
the 2001 congressional resolution.

Gonzales has acknowledged disagreement with former Justice Department
officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General
James Comey, about the legality of the program.

In responses to written questions from Specter, Gonzales challenged media
portrayals about the scope of the spy program, saying it is not "a dragnet that
sucks in all conversations and uses computer searches to pick out calls of
interest."

The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, reported Sunday that the
program involves computers sifting through hundreds of thousands of
communications to select for human review. The program has resulted in
thousands of conversations in which someone in the U.S. has been at least
briefly monitored, the Post said.

The Post report said that nearly all of them were quickly dismissed as
insignificant and that perhaps no more than 10 solid leads a year have been
pursued with further domestic surveillance, usually with a court warrant.

But Gen. Michael Hayden, the No. 2 intelligence official in the government,
said it was "not true" that "we somehow grab the content of communications and
then use the content of the communications to determine which of the
communications we really want to listen to."

"When NSA goes after the content of a communication under this authorization
from the president, the NSA has already established its reasons for being
interested in that specific communication," Hayden said on "Fox News
Sunday."

In addition to possibly pursuing documents about the program's legal basis,
Specter said he might seek testimony from Ashcroft and Comey.

"If we come to it and we need it, I'll be open about it," Specter said,
referring to subpoenas. "If the necessity arises, I won't be timid."

Specter also said the administration should tread carefully when it came to
using subpoenas against journalists to investigate leaks of classified
information. The New York Times in December disclosed the existence of the NSA
program, which is classified.

"I think if you move into the area of really serious national security
issues, that there may be a justification for it," he said.